The Social Psychological Narrative, or, What Is Social Psychology, Anyway?

One of the basic assumptions of the field is that it's not the objective environment that influences people, but their constructs of the world. You have to get inside people's heads and see the world the way they do. You have to look at the kinds of narratives and stories people tell themselves as to why they're doing what they're doing. What can get people into trouble sometimes in their personal lives, or for more societal problems, is that these stories go wrong. People end up with narratives that are dysfunctional in some way.

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TIMOTHY D. WILSON, the Sherrell J. Aston Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia, is author of Strangers To Ourselves("the most influential book I've ever read", Malcolm Gladwell), which was named by TheNew York Times Magazine as one of the Best 100 Ideas of 2002 He is also the coauthor of the best-selling social psychology textbook, Social Psychology, now in its seventh edition. His latest trade book is Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change.

Psychology has always had a love-hate relationship with the unconscious, but mainly hate. The unconscious was the cornerstone of Freud’s theories about the mind, but William James expressed the views of many early 20th century scientists when he referred to it as "the sovereign means for believing what one likes in psychology, and for turning what might become a science into a tumbling-ground for whimsies." James’s antipathy was contagious and his arguments won the day. The unconscious was banished to psychology’s basement for more than half a century.

But in the mid 1970’s, Tim Wilson and Dick Nisbett opened the basement door with their landmark paper entitled "Telling More Than We Can Know," in which they reported a series of experiments showing that people are often unaware of the true causes of their own actions, and that when they are asked to explain those actions, they simply make stuff up. People don’t realize they are making stuff up, of course; they truly believe the stories they are telling about why they did what they did. But as the experiments showed, people are telling more than they can know. The basement door was opened by experimental evidence, and the unconscious took up permanent residence in the living room. Today, psychological science is rife with research showing the extraordinary power of unconscious mental processes.

If liberating the unconscious had been Wilson’s only contribution to psychological science, it would have been enough. But it was just the start. Wilson has since discovered and documented a variety of fascinating ways in which all of us are "strangers to ourselves" (which also happens to be the title of his last book—a book that Malcolm Gladwell, writing in the New Yorker, correctly called the best popular psychology book published in the last twenty years). He has done brilliant research on topics ranging from "reasons analysis" (it turns out that when people are asked to generate reasons for their decisions, they typically make bad ones) to "affective forecasting" (it turns out that people can’t predict how future events will make them feel), but at the center of all his work lies a single enigmatic insight: we seem to know less about the worlds inside our heads than about the world our heads are inside.

The Torah asks this question: "Is not a flower a mystery no flower can explain?" Some scholars have said yes, some scholars have said no. Wilson has said, "Let’s go find out." He has always worn two professional hats — the hat of the psychologist and the hat of the methodologist. He has written extensively about the importance of using experimental methods to solve real world problems, and in his work on the science of psychological change — he uses a scientific flashlight to chase away a whole host of shadows by examining the many ways in which human beings try to change themselves — from self-help to psychotherapy — and asking whether these things really work, and if so, why? His answers will surprise many people and piss off the rest. I predict that this new work will be the center of a very interesting storm.

THE SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGICAL NARRATIVE — OR — WHAT IS SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, ANYWAY?

[TIMOTHY D. WILSON:] Questions that I have asked myself throughout my career are largely ones about self-knowledge and the role of the conscious mind versus unconsciousness; the limits of introspection; and the problems of introspection. For example, how it can sometimes get us into trouble to think too much about why we're doing what we’re doing. These are questions I began asking in graduate school with my graduate advisor, Dick Nisbett, and they have concerned me ever since.

The Social Psychological Narrative, or, What Is Social Psychology, Anyway?

There has been a question lurking in the back of my mind for all those years, which is how can we take this basic knowledge and use it to solve problems of today? I grew up in the turbulent 1960s, in an era where it seemed like the whole world was changing, and that we could have a hand in changing it. Part of my reason for studying psychology in the first place was because I felt that this was something that could help solve social problems. In graduate school and beyond I fell in love with basic research, which is still my first love. It is thrilling to investigate basic questions of self-knowledge and consciousness and unconsciousness. But those other, more applied questions have continued to rattle around and recently come to the fore, the more I realized how much social psychology has to offer.

One of the basic assumptions of the field is that it's not the objective environment that influences people, but their constructs of the world. You have to get inside people's heads and see the world the way they do. You have to look at the kinds of narratives and stories people tell themselves as to why they're doing what they're doing. What can get people into trouble sometimes in their personal lives, or for more societal problems, is that these stories go wrong. People end up with narratives that are dysfunctional in some way.

We know from cognitive behavioral therapy and clinical psychology that one way to change people's narratives is through fairly intensive psychotherapy. But social psychologists have suggested that, for less severe problems, there are ways to redirect narratives more easily that can have amazingly powerful long-term effects. This is an approach that I've come to call story editing. By giving people little prompts, suggestions about the ways they might reframe a situation, or think of it in a slightly different way, we can send them down a narrative path that is much healthier than the one they were on previously.

One of the first studies I did after graduate school tested a story-editing intervention of this kind. We recruited a sample of college students who were caught in a self-defeating thought cycle, where they were not doing well academically (these were first-year students) and were quite worried. They seemed to be blaming themselves and thinking that maybe they were one of those admissions errors that just couldn't cut it at college, which of course made it all the more difficult to study.

We did a brief intervention where, in about 30 minutes, we gave them some facts and some testimonials from other students that suggested that their problems might have a different cause; namely, that it's hard to learn the ropes in college at first, but that people do better as the college years go on, when they learn to adjust and to study differently than they did in high school and so on.

This little message that maybe it's not me, it's the situation I'm in, and that that can change, seemed to alter people's stories in ways that had dramatic effects down the road. Namely, people who got this message, as compared to a control group that did not, got better grades over the next couple of years and were less likely to drop out of college. Since then, there have been many other demonstrations of this sort that show that little ways of getting people to redirect their narrative from one path down another is a powerful tool to help people live better lives.

Another issue that interests me is that a lot of the existing interventions out there to help people are not based on theory, and even worse, haven't been tested. If there's one thing social psychologists do know how to do, it's how to do experiments and how to test whether an intervention is working, and with good control groups and statistical analyses, seeing whether something works or not. Yet, a lot of the current programs in a wide variety of areas have never been vetted in that way, and are just based on common sense.

There are lots of famous examples, for example the D.A.R.E. anti-drug program, which my two kids went through when they were in school. In fact, 70 percent of schools in America use this program. It was not tested until fairly recently, and the results showed that not only does it not work, but there is a hint of evidence that it actually increases alcohol and tobacco use in students. I find it shocking that something that turns out to have a negative effect, or at best, no effect, has been implemented in 70 percent of our schools before we even tested it.

There are lots of other examples. Scared Straight programs to scare at-risk kids out of a life of crime turn out to increase the likelihood they will commit crimes. Yet scared straight programs are still in use in many communities in the United States. There is a program intended to prevent child abuse, called Healthy Families America, that has been implemented throughout the United States at a cost of millions of dollars. It turns out to have no effect.

Then there's the whole self-help industry, which is interesting because it's not that all of their messages are wrong; it's that they're packaged in a way that give people hope that isn't backed up by science. I tend to think of the self-help industry as kind of like playing the lottery. That is, if we buy a lottery ticket, we're buying hope. We don't really think we're going to win, but for the week before the drawing, we can dream that we're going to suddenly have millions of dollars.

Self-help books are a little bit like that, where we buy them with a promise that our lives will suddenly be better, and all our problems will be solved. We kind of know that's probably not true. But we have a little bit of hope that it will come about.

In fact, there's something in that industry called the 18-Month Rule, that the person most likely to buy a self-help book is one who's bought one 18 months earlier. All of this a little galling to a social psychologist: there actually is some pretty good research on how to become happier and how to overcome personal difficulties that can be done relatively simply but which the self-help industry ignores. For example, my friend and colleague, Jamie Pennebaker, has developed a writing exercise that is typically done three or four nights in a row, where you write about a problem for about 15 minutes each time. Doing so has remarkable long-term benefits on people’s health and well-being.

Researchers such as Ethan Kross and Ozlem Ayduk have honed this method and, along with Pennebaker, have shown how it works. Think back to the story editing metaphor: What these writing exercises do is make us address problems that we haven't been able to make sense of and put us through a sense-making process of reworking it in such a way that we gain a new perspective and find some meaning, so that we basically come up with a better story that allows us to put that problem behind us. This is a great example of a story editing technique that can be quite powerful.

Let’s go back to a basic question that often comes up is, namely what is social psychology? It's a good question because it's something the public doesn't really understand. For example, there's a recent article in The New York Times by an economist who referred to me and my friend, Dan Gilbert, as economists. Those are fighting words! But in a way it is our field's own fault that we haven't succeeded making social psychology more a part of the public discourse.

Social psychology is a branch of psychology that began in the 1950s, mostly by immigrants from Germany who were escaping the Nazi regime--Kurt Lewin being the most influential ones. What they had to offer at that time was largely an alternative to behaviorism. Instead of looking at behavior as solely the product of our objective reinforcement environment, Lewin and others said you have to get inside people's heads and look at the world as they perceive it. These psychologists were very influenced by Gestalt psychologists who were saying the same thing about perception, and they applied this lesson to the way the mind works in general.

The other big contribution of these early social psychologists was a methodological one. There were experiments at the time, but largely on things such as perception and memory. The idea that you could also do experiments on more complex issues about social interaction and social influence was quite novel at the time. Lewin and his students and colleagues, such as Leon Festinger, Hal Kelley, Stanley Schachter, and others, showed that you use rigorous scientific methods to study how the mind works more broadly in a social context.

But to be honest, the field is a little hard to define. What is social psychology? Well, the social part is about interactions with other people, and topics such as conformity are active areas of research. Everyone knows the famous Milgram studies on obedience to authority, which showed that a strong authority figure can lead others to shock people to the point of death, in their minds.

There's also a branch called cognitive social psychology, which overlaps with cognitive psychology and research on judgment and decision-making, focusing on mental processes that occur in a social context. How does the mind work and how does it make decisions? How do people think about themselves and the social world? Social psychologists have a unique way of looking at the mind, doing so very broadly and considering the role of emotion, instead of focusing solely on cold cognition. People like me, Dan Gilbert, and many others, are investigating social cognition as a way of understanding how people think about themselves and the social world and how this influences their behavior. For example, Dan and I have been looking at the topic of Affective Forecasting, which is concerned with the way in which people think about the future and how they think they will react emotionally to a specific event that might befall them.

How will we feel and how long will we feel that way if we become ill, or if we have a windfall of money or if we take this career path, or if we marry this person instead of that person? Many of our most important decisions in life are based on these affective forecasts, whereby we try to gauge how we will feel about an event in the future, especially over the long run. We are by no means terrible at this; obviously we have a pretty good sense of what will lead to positive feelings and what will lead to negative feelings. But, there are systematic mistakes to which people are prone when making affective forecasts.

Perhaps the most common is what we call the Impact Bias, which is that people overestimate the emotional impact of many events on their lives. We think that if we win the lottery we'll be happy forever. The research on that suggests that not only is that not true, but if anything, lottery winners become less happy, often, because their lives are disrupted in any number of ways. On the negative side, we tend to think that those things that we dread, that would be awful, the death of loved ones, the loss of a job, and so on, will make us unhappy forever. Although they are terrible things to endure, we are more resilient than we anticipate and often get over these events more quickly than we anticipate.

This research has been picked up by medical researchers looking at treatment decisions that often are very difficult choices to make, such as how to treat a disease when there are various options available. People often choose treatments that they think will lead to the best overall well-being and quality of life, but they are not necessarily correct. Physicians struggle with how to educate people that, in their experience, option A may be better than B, but people are convinced that B is better than A, in terms of quality of life.

Legal scholars have begun to look at affective forecasting in terms of decision-making by juries and others, when the goal is to try to gauge the impact of events on a plaintiff's overall well-being, as is often done in civil suits.

But research on affective forecasting has some life lessons for all of us. I have to confess that I come from a family of worriers; my family was one of those that always imagined the worst scenario that could happen, and ruminating on the fact that gee, you know, that's going to be terrible. Research on affective forecasting has been a solace because I know that yes, terrible things might happen, and if they do, it will be terrible at first, but then life goes on. We are pretty resilient creatures, and sooner rather than later, we'll find a way to deal with life’s worst blows.

Social psychologists think they have something to offer in terms of the discourse on how to solve problems, how to think about many of the issues facing us today. But we haven't done a very good job of making our field part of that discourse with policy makers. Many policy makers, if they're thinking about a problem, such as how to increase condom use in Africa, how to reduce poverty in the United States, or how to reduce prejudice and stereotyping, turn to economists. Some of my best friends are economists; I don't mean to disparage the field, but they think differently about these problems than do social psychologists. They think of human behavior as largely governed by external incentives. Most economists don't take the social psychological approach of trying to get inside the heads of people and understanding how they interpret the world.

I'll give one example. When economists think about how to solve a problem such as closing the achievement gap in education, or reducing teenage pregnancy, their inclination is to use incentives. What if we pay people to do well in school, give kids money to study and to get good grades? Or what if we take girls who are at-risk for becoming pregnant and pay them a dollar for each day they are not pregnant?

To a social psychologist, it is a little naïve to think that adding external incentives is all you have to do. Not to say that incentives can't work, but they can sometimes backfire if you look at it through the eyes of the person who is getting that incentive. There's some research in social psychology suggesting that external incentives can undermine intrinsic interest in an activity because people begin to think that the only reason they're doing it is for the money. That erodes any interest in that activity there was to start with.

Now, in defense of economists, they do think big. They think of systems at large, and they are increasingly doing experimental interventions to try to see what works. I'm envious, in many ways, of the scale at which they are able to attempt to solve problems. One limitation of social psychology is that we have concentrated mostly on basic issues about the mind in laboratory studies, many of them done with college students. There's an issue in how to scale up those interventions to see if they work with society at large. That's a gap we need to fill, and people are increasingly doing so. Taking some of these basic social psychological principles and seeing if they can be scaled up to work more generally, not just in the laboratory with a college student, is an exciting prospect, and there have been some spectacular successes in doing just that.

I'll give one example that I'm very fond of, that was done by Geoffrey Cohen and his colleagues. Geoff is a social psychologist who trained with Claude Steele, and was very well-versed in Steele’s self-affirmation theory, which is the idea that when we feel a threat to our self-esteem that's difficult to deal with, sometimes the best thing we can do is to affirm ourselves in some completely different domain. If I am concerned that I can't make it in academics, it can take the heat off that concern if I think of something I'm very good at and I care about in some other domain, such as I'm a family man or interested in politics or what-have-you. Research on self-affirmation theory was done mostly with college students in the laboratory, showing that affirming oneself in an unrelated domain is a powerful way to restore self-esteem.

Well, Cohen had the insight that maybe this can be used in middle schools with minority kids, African-American kids in this case, who are facing challenges to their self-esteem in the academic realm. The negative stereotype that African-Americans are not as smart as whites has very damaging effects on African-American students, because when they are in academic achievement situations, not only do they have to worry about doing well for their own sake, they have this extra baggage of, gee, if I don't do well, I'm also confirming a negative stereotype about my group. This is what Claude Steele has referred to as stereotype threat.

Well, Cohen thought, maybe we can take the research on self-affirmation and use it to reduce stereotype threat in middle school kids. If we can get African-American middle school kids to affirm themselves in some domain unrelated to the academic realm, he hypothesized, this will take the heat off and make it actual easier for them to do well academically. He did an intervention in which middle school kids wrote about a value that they cared about in their lives, other than academics. They did this for 15 minutes, three to five times during the semester, depending on the version of the study. That was it: write about something you care about in your life other than academics.

This was a good experiment, because there was a randomly-assigned control group of kids who did not do this exercise. The intervention had remarkably long-term effects: The African American kids who did the writing exercise, compared to the control group, did better academically for the next couple of years. In fact, the intervention closed the achievement gap between the black and white students by 40 percent. It had no effect on the white kids because they weren't at-risk for stereotype threat in academic domains. It seems to have lowered the heat for the black kids when they were in an achievement situation, enabling them to do better.

That's one of many examples in which a social psychological principle discovered in the laboratory with basic research can be scaled up to solve a problem more generally in education or other domains. My dream is that policymakers will become more familiar with this approach and be as likely to call upon a social psychologist as an economist to address social issues. Now, again, my field deserves some of the blame for this; historically we haven't always met policy makers halfway and tried to do more of this kind of work. But that's changing, and social psychological interventions are becoming more and more common.

In addition to using social psychological research to inform policy, it can be used to change the way we live our own lives. Something I think about a lot is how my life has changed as a student in this field. The importance of how we frame things and the idea that we have to look at our construals of the world, well, it's a little unsettling, personally, because it does suggest that the way we view the world isn't necessarily the correct way or the best way. Or that what we're seeing isn't necessarily reality. And that can lead to a little less confidence or certainty about the world and our place in it. But it's not such a bad thing to have a little humility that our view may not be the only one, or even the best one.

Another interesting question is the role of evolutionary theory in psychology, and social psychology in particular. I can trace the history of that a little bit. I got my PhD in 1977, and that was just around the time that evolutionary theory was being applied to social behavior, through E.O. Wilson's work in sociobiology, and others. But it really, at least right away, did not make inroads into social psychology. In fact, in the late '70s, if a social psychologist were to say I'm an evolutionary theorist, that would have been a really taboo thing to say. It would have struck people as overly deterministic, and perhaps even sexist, to look at gender differences in social behavior as somehow inherent in the human condition.

But things sure have things changed. Evolutionary psychology has become a dominant force in the field. There are many who use it as their primary theoretical perspective, as a way to understand why we do what we do. I'll get myself in trouble with some of my colleagues for saying this, but I am not a fan.

Evolutionary theory has its use. Of course, evolution is true, as a general theory of how the human species evolved. As an explanation for current social behavior, it can be a useful heuristic, if it can generate hypotheses that we would not have come up with otherwise that can then be tested with rigorous methods. But too often, there's a very loose kind of theorization that goes on, where people just tell a story and assume that it's true because it kind of makes sense.

I've been writing this paper in my head for many years, that maybe I'll put on paper at some point, called “Evolutionary Theory, The New Psychoanalysis.” There are some striking parallels between psychoanalytic theory and evolutionary theory. Both theories, at some general level are true. Evolutionary theory, of course, shows how the forces of natural selection operated on human beings. Psychoanalytic theory argues that our childhood experiences mold us in certain ways and give us outlooks on the world. Our early relationships with our parents lead to unconscious structures that can be very powerful.

But both theories led to a lot of absurd conclusions, and both are very hard to test rigorously. The influence of psychoanalysis waned in research psychology because it was too broad. It made too many assumptions that were very hard to test, and basically it explained everything. That said, it did actually lead to some interesting hypotheses that were tested rigorously. One example is Susan Andersen's work on transference, which shows that, indeed, we do have blueprints about relationships that form and influence our perceptions of new relationships.

Evolutionary theory, in a way, has the same status. It can explain virtually anything. It can be a useful heuristic, as I mentioned. But at the same time, I think it is way too broad. Another parallel between the two theories is they both seem obsessed with gender differences. There are many ways that we could think about human behavior, but zeroing in on why women are different from men is something both theories were obsessed with, and both theories have gotten wrong, to some extent, in attributing differences in social behavior to genetic hardwired influences.

The storytelling method is a real problem. In one of Steve Pinker's books he gave the example that not everything is an adaptation. For example, the fact that blood is red, he says, isn't necessarily a result of natural selection. Well, I could make up a story as to why it is. What if in our very early mammalian history, blood was more brown, but there was a mutation that made it more red, and that turned out to have survival value because if an animals were bleeding, those with red blood would be more likely to notice it, and then they'd lick it. Because licking has healing properties, this conveyed a survival advantage, and so red blood was selected for, and blood became red. Am I right? Or is Steve right, that the color of blood is not an adaptation? Who knows. The plausibility of a story is not a good way to settle a question scientifically. Now again, in fairness, there are some very interesting hypotheses that we would not have come up with if it were not for evolutionary principles that have led to some interesting lines of research. But there are not that many of them.

One example where evolutionary psychology led to some interesting testable hypotheses is work by Jon Haidt, my colleague at the University of Virginia. He has developed a theory of moral foundations that says that all human beings endorse the same list of moral values, but that people of different political stripes believe some of these values are more important than others. In other words, liberals may have somewhat different moral foundations than conservatives. Jon has persuasively argued that one reason that political discourse has become so heated and divisive in our country is that there is a lack of understanding in one camp of the moral foundations that the other camp is using to interpret and evaluate the world. If we can increase that understanding, we might lower the heat and improve the dialogue between people on opposite ends of the political spectrum.

Another way in which evolutionary theory has been used is to address questions about the origins of religion. This is not a literature I have followed that closely, to be honest, but there's obviously a very interesting discourse going on about group selection and the origins and purpose of religion. The only thing I'll add is, back to what I've said before about the importance of having narratives and stories to give people a sense of meaning and purpose, well, religion is obviously one very important source of such narratives. Religion gives us a sense that there is a purpose and a meaning to life, the sense that we are important in the universe, and that our lives aren't meaningless specks like a piece of sand on a beach. That can be very powerful for our well-being. I don't think religion is the only way to accomplish that; there are many belief systems that can give us a sense of meaning and purpose other than religion. But religion can fill that void.

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Reality Club Discussion

Johnstone Family Professor, Department of Psychology; Harvard University; Author, The Sense of Style

In his defense of social psychology as it is currently practiced, Timothy Wilson repeats the canard that evolutionary explanations of traits are exercises in "storytelling" which can "explain anything." He boasts, for example, that he can make up a story in which the redness of blood is an adaptation:

"What if in our very early mammalian history, blood was more brown, but there was a mutation that made it more red, and that turned out to have survival value because if an animals were bleeding, those with red blood would be more likely to notice it, and then they'd lick it. Because licking has healing properties, this conveyed a survival advantage, and so red blood was selected for, and blood became red. Am I right? Or is Steve [Pinker] right, that the color of blood is not an adaptation? Who knows."

What this shows is that Timothy Wilson can think up an ludicrous evolutionary hypothesis. It does not show that all evolutionary hypotheses are similarly ludicrous. In fact we do know who's right about blood. Chemists tell us that the redness of blood is a necessary physical property of oxygenated hemoglobin, necessary for gas exchange in virtually all vertebrates. This immediately implies that any adaptive hypothesis is otiose. Adaptive hypotheses are needed to explain traits that are improbable given the biologically and physically possible variation in organisms. (This is a basic principle of theoretical biology, most clearly articulated by George Williams in 1966.) The redness of blood is not improbable among mammals; its probability is 1. Moreover, molecular phylogeny has traced the history of hemoglobin hundreds of millions of years, and we know that there was never a stage of mammalian evolution in which oxygenated blood was any other color but red.

Even if, in defiance of biology and common sense, one were to take the wound-licking hypothesis seriously, it would be easy to test it empirically. To test an adaptive hypothesis, one needs to set out the engineering specs of an optimal system for attaining the specified goal (which ultimately must be a subgoal of reproduction) in the organism's environment. Crucially, to avoid circularity, the engineering analysis must invoke principles independent from the trait one is trying to explain—principles which may come, depending on the trait, from physics, chemistry, ecology, physiology, population genetics, game theory, network theory, the theory of computation, and so on. Then one empirically compares the engineering specs with the actual properties of the trait in question: the closer the match (particularly for improbable features of the trait), the greater the confidence that the nonrandom organization of the trait is the product of a history of selection. For more than a century, biologists have invoked color science, ecology, and geography to distinguish among various adaptive and non-adaptive theories of animal coloration, such as camouflage (does the coloration match the spatial frequency and wavelength distribution of the animal's typical environment?), sexual selection (does it appear specifically on the visible surfaces of the competitive sex in breeding season?), tissue protection (does it correlate geographically with solar UV?), and so on. Such logic could trivially refute Wilson's rhetorical hypothesis, if anyone thought it was worth bothering to test: Do mammals fail to lick wounds they can't see? Do rufous mammals have green blood? Do nocturnal mammals have drab blood? Is blood red only in diurnal species with color vision? For Wilson to ask rhetorically "Who knows?" betrays an incuriosity about the logic and methodology of other fields of science.

Even in his own field of social psychology, Wilson is mistaken about evolutionary hypotheses. Of course one can come up with evolutionary hypotheses that can explain anything; one can come up with non-evolutionary hypotheses that can explain anything, too. The question is, do these hypotheses make testable predictions that are confirmed? In the case of evolutionary explanations, the answer is a clear "yes." In a 2003 Psychological Bulletin article, David Buss listed fifty novel predictions about social behavior derived from evolutionary theory, most of which had been supported at the time by empirical tests. Entire fields of social-psychological research—on violence, love, beauty, motherhood, religion, sexual desire, parent-offspring conflict, dominance, status, self-conscious emotions, and yes, sex differences (which everyone in the world but Wilson thinks is an important phenomenon)—have been driven by tests of evolutionary hypotheses. Many other evolutionary hypotheses—the nepotism theory of homosexuality, for example, and the Trivers-Willard hypothesis applied to female infanticide—have been empirically falsified as well, leaving the phenomena in question unexplained. It's simply not true that evolutionary hypotheses that make correct empirical predictions can "explain anything."

I bring all this up not just to defend evolutionary psychology but because it speaks to the puzzle that Wilson himself raises: Why doesn't social psychology get more respect? I readily agree that social psychology, not least Wilson's own research, has made profound discoveries, which deserve a greater place in policy and personal recommendations. But the field has been self-handicapped with a relentless insistence on theoretical shallowness: on endless demonstrations that People are Really Bad at X, which are then "explained" by an ever-lengthening list of Biases, Fallacies, Illusions, Neglects, Blindnesses, and Fundamental Errors, each of which restates the finding that people are really bad at X. Wilson, for example, defines "self-affirmation theory" as "the idea that when we feel a threat to our self-esteem that's difficult to deal with, sometimes the best thing we can do is to affirm ourselves in some completely different domain." Most scientists would not call this a "theory." It's a redescription of a phenomenon, which needs a theory to explain it.

Social psychology has, as Wilson noted, made valuable contributions in methodology and discovery. But to explain its own findings—to explain why humans are bad at what they are bad at, and good at what they are good at—it needs to invoke deeper principles from fields other than social psychology itself, including genetics, evolutionary biology, and economics. Wilson's dismissals of the very fields that could complement and deepen social psychology help answer his question of why his discipline is not taken as seriously as it should be.

Surely the lesson in this debate is that experts in one area should probably not make rash generalizations about other areas. When my friend and collaborator, Tim Wilson, suggests that evolutionary psychology is merely a set of "just-so stories," he repeats an old canard that was laid to rest long ago. My friend and colleague, Steve Pinker, properly takes him to task and shows why his claim is...well, just not so.

If only Steve had stopped there. Alas, he goes on to make rash generalizations of his own. For instance, he claims that social psychology's "relentless insistence on theoretical shallowness" has given rise to "an ever lengthening list" of biases and errors that describe phenomena but do not explain them. This suggestion is worse than wrong (which anyone can be). It is ignorant (which Steve usually is not).

Consider one example. Steve suggests that the "fundamental attribution error" (which is the tendency for people to make non-normative inferences about the causes of other people's actions) is one of those phenomena that social psychologists have described but failed to explain. In fact, social psychologists have spent decades working out the details of the explanation for this phenomenon and it goes like this: Certain inferential processes are automatic and others require conscious attention. These processes typically unfold in sequence to produce normative inferences, but when a person's attention is usurped by other tasks, the processes that require attention are impaired and inferences are thus generated by the automatic processes alone. This "sequential operations" account doesn't just tell us that the Fundamental Attribution Error occurs — it tells us precisely why. It also predicts (correctly, as it turns out) the conditions under which this error will be exacerbated, ameliorated, and reversed. Whatever one thinks of this particular explanation, to call it a "mere description" is just silly. Specifying the characteristics and timing of the information-processing operations that give rise to observable behavior is one of the things that "explanation" means in psychology, and it is one of the things that social psychologists do.

Steve may have a thin understanding of social psychology (no, it is not the science of "personal recommendations") and a short memory (social psychology was a cognitive science when the rest of psychology was pigeon training), but he comes closer to knowing everything than anyone else I know. Maybe that's why I find it refreshing when he occasionally reminds me that he isn't there quite yet.

Sherrell J. Aston Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia; Co-author, Social Psychology; Author, Strangers to Ourselves; Redirect

I should have known better, in my Edge interview, than to take on someone as erudite, smart, and broad as Steve Pinker, whose work I admire. He makes many fine points in his rebuttal. As for the example about the color of blood, well, perhaps this was an unwise choice on my part, though for a reason Steve doesn’t mention: It is about a physical trait, when our disagreement is really about the value of evolutionary theory in explaining social behavior. But Steve goes on to express sentiments about the entire field of social psychology that are pretty shocking for someone so smart and widely-read.

To be clear, evolutionary theory is obviously true and has added to our knowledge about social behavior, by suggesting novel hypotheses that could then be tested with the experimental method. But I believe the examples of this are far fewer than Steve suggests. He mentions a 2003 paper by David Buss that "listed fifty novel predictions about social behavior derived from evolutionary theory." I went back and checked that list to see how novel those predictions were. Many of them fail the novelty test in that they were well-known phenomena before evolutionary psychology existed, such as, "Sex difference in opposite-sex friendships." Does Steve mean to imply that it wasn’t until evolutionary psychology took hold in the in 1970s and 1980s that we discovered that there was such a phenomenon? For many of the items it is not the phenomenon that is novel but the explanation of it.

This confusion between a phenomenon and the explanation is evident in another of Steve’s points: "Entire fields of social-psychological research—on violence, love, beauty, motherhood, religion, sexual desire, parent-offspring conflict, dominance, status, self-conscious emotions, and yes, sex differences (which everyone in the world but Wilson thinks is an important phenomenon)— have been driven by tests of evolutionary hypotheses." But wait a minute. Most of these topics (e.g., violence, love, beauty, emotions) have a long history of study in social psychology that predates evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychologists did not discover these phenomena. Like Freud, we already knew about Lieben und Arbeiten—what is at issue is how much we need evolutionary theory to explain these phenomena.

Whether evolutionary theory survives as a major explanation of social behavior, or goes the way of psychoanalytic theory, remains to be seen. Actually, I think it might survive and eventually prove useful, as technological and methodological advances march on. Someday (probably long after Steve and I are gone) we will know the answer to complex questions about the ways in which genetic, social, and cultural factors interact, and achieve a much better understanding of the etiology and malleability of human behavior. In some ways it is unfair of me to criticize a field that is in its infancy, but I fear that the emphasis on evolutionary principles, in a simplistic way, fosters the view that human behavior is fixed and that we don’t need psychological theory to explain it.

I know that evolutionary psychologists disavow that viewpoint, but it creeps in. In fact, it is evident in Steve’s rather odd take on social psychology as a discipline. He says, "Social psychology has, as Wilson noted, made valuable contributions in methodology and discovery. But to explain its own findings—to explain why humans are bad at what they are bad at, and good at what they are good at—it needs to invoke deeper principles from fields other than social psychology itself." I’m afraid I’m lost here. A field needs to find explanations outside of its own principles and constructs? Why is that exactly? Is Steve questioning the value of psychological explanation, as opposed to biological ones? (That would be a long conversation.) And why do those "deeper principles" have to be rooted in evolutionary theory? Or in economics for heaven’s sake?

In my interview, I voiced concerns about the lack of impact social psychology has had on public policy. I have no such concerns about its standing as an important theoretical discipline. It is full of empirically-grounded insights that allow us to explain and predict human behavior—much better, I might add, than saying "natural selection made people that way" or "incentives are important." Let me put this differently: We are faced with many pressing problems today, such as improving personal well-being, improving people’s parenting skills, dealing with problems of adolescence such as violence and drug use, and reducing prejudice and racism. Now, suppose there were three people in a bar—a social psychologist, an evolutionary psychologist, and an economist. Which one would be better equipped to solve these problems? To me, it’s no contest. Social psychologists have already shown, for example, that by using the theoretical principles of self-affirmation theory, we can reduce the achievement gap in a middle school by 40% (as mentioned in my interview).

Perhaps I’ll have an opportunity to actually be in that bar with Steve Pinker at some point, so we can debate these issues further (he can bring the economist). I would welcome the opportunity, for there are few psychologists alive today who are as brilliant and well-read as Steve.

Cognitive Scientist, French National Center for Scientific Research; Co-author (with Dan Sperber) of The Enigma of Reason

In the course of defending the still ‘mainstream’ way of practicing social psychology, Timothy Wilson feels compelled to criticize evolutionary explanations of human behavior. As pointed out by Steven Pinker in his commentary, Wilson’s critique is quite weak. In fact it’s even possible to use Wilson’s own research to demonstrate that evolutionary hypotheses are both satisfying and testable.

One of the major findings unearthed by Wilson and his colleagues is that reasoning can sometimes drive people towards poor decisions. In a series of brilliant experiments, they compared decisions made by participants who were specifically asked to consider reasons for their choice to those of a control group who made more spontaneous decisions. When the experiment was done with jams, people made choices that were less in line with experts’ ratings. More strikingly maybe, when the experiment was done with posters, people actually made decisions that satisfied them less—a few weeks later, they were less happy with the choices they had made.

These results are quite striking and run against the grain of conventional cognitive psychology, which sees reasoning as a way of improving decisions. Explanations for this finding have been offered in terms of mechanisms—‘proximal’ explanations. For instance, it could be that conscious reasoning is only able to process a limited number of elements at any given time, whereas ‘unconscious thinking’ can deal with more complex situations thanks to parallel processing.

Such proximal explanations are very important, but one is still entitled to wonder about ultimate explanations: given that the outcome is apparently ‘stupid’ (or maladaptive), why is the system designed in such a way? By analogy, biologists can provide proximal accounts of puzzling animal behavior. For instance, they could explain why some male spiders copulate with females that are going to eat them afterwards by showing that the females emit signals that males find irresistible. I bet most people (that certainly seems to be the case of most biologists) would find such an explanation incomplete: they would want to know why the male is irresistibly attracted to the female despite the deadly embrace that ensues. Similarly, people are entitled to wonder why reasoning should be designed in such as way as to drive people to poor decisions.

Dan Sperber and I have suggested an evolutionary explanation for the findings of Wilson and his colleagues. The function of reasoning is not what it is usually thought to be—to allow the lone reasoner to make better decisions and get at better beliefs. Instead, its function is argumentative: to find and evaluate arguments in dialogic settings. This argumentative theory of reasoning can explain reasoning biases—most strikingly the confirmation bias—and it predicts the conditions in which reasoning is likely to lead people to better decisions—or to fail to do so. The participants in Wilson’s experiments were likely engaging in ‘reason-based choice’: in line with its argumentative nature, reasoning was driving them to make decisions that they could justify rather than more personally satisfying decisions.

Such an evolutionary hypothesis is by no mean a ‘just so story’. It makes specific predictions that can be evaluated against known results or tested in new experiments. By dismissing evolutionary explanations as impossible to test, Wilson deprives himself of a valuable source of insight to explain the very quirks of human nature he has helped uncover.

Johnstone Family Professor, Department of Psychology; Harvard University; Author, The Sense of Style

I thank Dan Gilbert and Tim Wilson for elaborating on these issues, which I look forward to discussing further at our beer summit. I need no convincing that social psychology is a vital field which has made enduring contributions to intellectual life, and regret any choice of words that imply otherwise. But I think the field does itself a disservice if—alone among contemporary sciences—it remains content to stay within its disciplinary boundaries.

I'm aware of the research on the Fundamental Attribution Error that Dan describes, and didn't mean to imply that social psychologists discovered the error and left it at that—on the contrary, it's among the most studied phenomena in the recent history of psychology. But I'm less satisfied than Dan that it can be explained by the rather blunt instrument of the automatic/controlled dichotomy. The problem, as I see it, is that such accounts often beg the question of why certain forms of social reasoning are automatic and others are controlled. In the case of the overattribution of behavior to an actor's stable disposition at the expense of the context (or vice-versa), it isn't obvious why observers should automatically anchor their attribution to the actor's disposition, particularly in tasks where the contribution of the person's disposition is exactly what the experimenter is asking them to evaluate. Nor is it obvious why, given plenty of time and freedom from distractions, observers' conscious reasoning processes nonetheless fail to adequately discount the specifics of the situation. Would the distinction between automatic and conscious processes really have been sufficient to deduce that expert observers would underestimate the proportion of obedient subjects in the Milgram experiment by a factor of seven hundred?) This is not to deny the ingenuity and importance of the studies showing how cognitive load can increase attribution errors, just to question whether we should be content that the phenomenon has been explained in these ways.

This disquiet is not specific to Dan's information-processing account. Many cognitive scientists have become skeptical that any information-processing model of a psychological phenomenon suffices to explain it. Noam Chomsky long ago distinguished the descriptive adequacy of a cognitive theory from its explanatory adequacy (in the case of a theory of language, the ability to explain how the language is acquired). David Marr similarly distinguished an algorithm from a theory of the computation: an account of the nature of the problem that the system is designed to solve (in the case of a visual illusion, for example, the general problem of reconstructing 3-D shape from shading), and of how the algorithm is capable of solving it (such as by exploiting the physics of reflection). Without these external constraints, there are too many ways to draw the flowchart, and no basis for preferring one over the others.

This takes us to Tim's question of why "a field needs to find explanations outside of its own principles and constructs." The answer, it seems to me, lies at the heart of the concept of explanation. A satisfying explanation invokes principles that are fewer in number, more general, earlier in the causal chain, and closer to irreducible physical and mathematical laws than the ones that immediately fit the data in question. And that will almost always take one outside the boundaries of one's academic specialty. In the case of social psychology, any explanation must ultimately invoke a conception of what our social emotions and reasoning processes are for. What are the goals of a social agent, and in what ways might they come into confluence or conflict with the goals of other social agents? These considerations supply the benchmarks against which the various errors and illusions and biases can be calibrated; they give us the ability to distinguish the bugs from the features. And the relevant considerations will often come from other fields, including economics, which supplies non-obvious predictions of what happens when social agents pursue competing goals, and evolutionary biology, which supplies non-obvious predictions about the competing social goals of Homosapiens.

Tim asks who would be best equipped to solving a social problem, a social psychologist, an evolutionary psychologist, or an economist, but this strikes me as the wrong question. The right question is, who is better equipped, a social psychologist who uses relevant ideas from evolutionary biology and economics (and other fields), or a social psychologist who doesn't?